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The Party of "No"

Technorati and Me

Technorati is indexing me again! They had to make a code change to fix
the problem with my blog getting stuck in their queue. Kudos to Eric M.
and the guys at
GetSatisfaction.com
where they have "community powered support for Technorati".

Well, they're "sorta, kinda" indexing me anyway. It's on a 24 hour tape
delay or something. So I never get picked up by Memeorandum because they
pull from Technorati and Technorati has stuff I posted yesterday
listed as my latest blog entry. And that's old news to Memeorandum.

Wankers.

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The Postal Service posted a record net loss of $15.9 billion in fiscal 2012,
much of it due to massive payments the mail agency could not make but still
must account for in financial statements.

That is more than triple its $5.1 billion loss last year.

The USPS, which relies on the sale of stamps and other products rather than
taxpayer dollars, has been grappling for years with high costs and tumbling
mail volumes as consumers communicate more online.

Postal officials have been scrambling to cut costs and boost other parts of
the business, such as package delivery, but it has not been enough to staunch
the losses. The USPS on Thursday repeated its call for lawmakers to quickly
pass legislation overhauling the agency's business model.

They think they're a private business. But Congress thinks they're still a
government agency. And Congress won't let go.

Must be that Franking Privilege. Politicians love free stuff, especially when
it's free stuff for them.

Why not break up the Post Office like we did with AT&T? Delivering mail in
New York City poses completely different challenges from delivering mail in
rural Montana. And there's no reason it should cost the same to send a letter
cross-town or cross-country. Unless somebody smarter than Congress can figure
out a way to make that business model profitable…

Oh, who am I kidding. The Post Office isn't in the mail delivery business.
They're in the pension and health insurance for old mailmen business. And
there ain't nobody who can make that profitable. It's only gonna
get more expensive with every passing year. You can't privatize government
pensions. Not yet, anyway. Not until the bottom really falls out.

Want some more interesting news? Four of the five top execs at USPS got
hefty raises this year. But of course. Rewarding failure is what
government does.

Man, I can't wait for the government to start running health care. We'll
wish they'd only lose $16 billion a year!